


Feel a Spark

by Bunny_Manders



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Hank/Connor in the background, M/M, reverse!au - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 04:47:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17318357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bunny_Manders/pseuds/Bunny_Manders
Summary: A reverse AU for Gavin Reed and RK900!Richard's used to competing with his brother Connor, but when the two of them sign up for the same android partner pilot program, Connor gets a brand new HK800 unit while Richard's stuck with an ancient GV model. Despite his new partner's limitations, Richard isn't going to let a poorly behaved piece of hardware hold him back.But when his partner turns out to be more than a machine, can Richard let himself love an android?





	Feel a Spark

Richard didn't understand why his older brother got assigned a top-of-the-line HK800 unit. They were in the same pilot program, the one Captain Stern had made her top priority. Stern thought her detectives should be paired with android partners; the androids could do the analysis and paperwork, while the people did the real work of solving crimes. It was supposed to make the cops more efficient, and she'd pitched it to the top brass with a promise that the program would pay for itself. Androids might be expensive up-front, but it wasn't like they needed salaries.

Signing up had seemed like the obvious choice at the time, a chance to prove himself in the pilot program. Richard's arrest record was higher than Connor's. He was polite around the station, maybe not quite as well-loved, but he'd certainly never given anyone cause to hate him. He just needed this special task force on his service record to get the promotion he knew he deserved. But once again he hadn't quite measured up to his brother, because he'd been stuck with an ancient GV200 unit the department had dragged out of storage.

“It's an ultralight unit, so it's got great battery life,” Stern told him, trying to sell him on the android. “We had it doing patrol duty for a while, and then the Illegal Modifications unit was using it to test a few theories, but it's still in good working order.”

Richard looked over the GV unit. Someone must have bashed its face in during its patrol days, because there was a gash over the bridge of its nose so deep that its synthetic skin couldn't close over the cracked plastic. Some of the modifications it had endured after that must have been cosmetic. Its jaw was covered with decidedly non-regulation stubble, and its skin had glitched in fine white lines over its lip and at the outer corner of its left eye.

“This thing should have been decommissioned years ago,” he told Captain Stern. It wasn't meant as a complaint, just a statement of fact. “Isn’t there any other unit I could work with?”

“Hey, fuck you too, buddy,” said the android.

Stern's lips pressed together as she tried to maintain her composure. “Some of the mods were to its personality matrix,” she said. “I'm sure someone down in Illegal Modifications can reverse them.”

Richard took the GV200 unit down to that office right away, where he was told that the modifications were all irreversible, but had he heard the department had a brand new HK800 unit? Yes, he replied, struggling to keep the irritation out of his voice. He was aware of the state of the art Cyberlife prototype currently being put to use as his brother's personal secretary.

The GV unit was a problem from the start. Its report filing software had been so badly corrupted that it returned paperwork filled with profanity and random asides. It had a habit of getting so combative with witnesses that after several incidents, Richard learned that the easiest way to calm it down was to pick it up and haul it away from the scene. It once spent half an hour digging frantically through a dumpster and came up not with a murder weapon, but an abandoned kitten.

Connor had decided within days of getting the HK800 that he was going to call his partner Hank. Richard didn't believe in giving androids names, but then Connor started calling his GV200 Gavin, and after a few days of that the android refused to respond to his real designation.

He'd never told Gavin that he kept the kitten, but even Cyberlife’s least functional investigator could tell that there were white hairs on the hem of Richard's dark trousers. Three months after the dumpster incident, Richard finally gave in to Gavin's pestering and let him into his apartment to see the cat. The android sprawled on the floor, totally fascinated by the animal. She returned the attention by climbing onto his chest and kneading her claws into the fabric of Gavin's white uniform hoodie. They were still in that position when Richard went to bed, and when he got up in the morning, Gavin was making a mess in his kitchen by pulling everything out of the cabinets while looking for the cat food.

After that, he had a way of keeping Gavin more or less under control. If he behaved himself at a crime scene, Richard would let him spend the night with the cat. It didn't always work, and sometimes after a bad day Richard would catch him coming in through the window because he'd climbed the fire escape, but at least it downgraded his behavior from intolerable to merely unprofessional.

By the end of the program's first year, he sometimes even found himself enjoying Gavin's company. Sure, he still had a habit of blowing his top at crime scenes, but only because he had an uncanny knack for telling when a witness was lying. He hated Connor's perfect android almost as much as Richard did, and never missed an opportunity to antagonize it.

Gavin had a knack for picking up a person’s worst traits and imitating them, wildly exaggerated, for comic effect. He could modulate his voice to sound like anyone. His imitation of Captain Stern’s patronizing rectitude was so good it had Richard doubled over in his car at a red light, forehead on the steering wheel, trying to stop laughing before the signal turned green.

Richard tried not to think about whether Gavin was mocking him around the station too, whether he’d mimic him by turning up his nose or by blurting out harsh truths. Even though he was just an android, Richard wanted to maintain the comfortable fiction that Gavin liked him.

A year and a half into the program, Gavin was behaving well enough that he was spending nearly every night at Richard’s apartment. When the cat got bored with his attention at night, Gavin would sit next to Richard on the fire escape or curl up beside him on the couch. He appeared to enjoy watching action movies so much that Richard found himself struggling to remember that androids didn't _enjoy_ anything. They weren't real people, they didn't have emotions, no matter how well Gavin could imitate anger or pleasure. It was just the modifications that made him act so human.

Connor was racking up the accolades for his work with the HK unit. Richard would sit through his brother's award ceremonies, smiling politely, occasionally elbowing the Gavin when it looked like he was about to do something wildly inappropriate in the middle of a speech. Then he'd return to his apartment, where he'd sit on the fire escape, smoke cigarettes, and feel sorry for himself. He knew his brother was better liked in the department, that his warmth and easy humor made him more popular even though Richard was the better detective. Or he had been, at least, before he was saddled with that damn defective android.

Gavin interrupted one of his private brooding sessions by crawling out onto the fire escape, perching on the iron railing, and imitating Connor's cheesy charm and Hank's gruffness until Richard was smiling in spite of himself. “Wouldn't you rather work with my brother if you had the choice, though?” he asked, forgetting for a moment that Gavin couldn't choose anything.

“I like being your partner.” Gavin slid off the railing and insinuated himself under Richard's arm, imitating the needy cat. “I'd choose you any day.”

Richard tried to ignore the warmth that spread through his chest at that statement. It wasn't real, he told himself. No one with free will would choose him over his brother.

Sometimes Gavin would sit down not on the couch but on Richard's lap. Now and then he'd try to follow Richard into bed, or slide his hands under Richard’s shirt, or press his highly engineered tongue into Richard's mouth. It wasn’t like him to be so clumsy in his mimicry of seduction. After he’d been gently but firmly rebuffed he'd sulk for days, barely talking at work and curling up in sullen silence on the couch at home.

Richard took him down to the Illegal Modifications unit time after time, trying to get them to remove whatever modification had caused this particular glitch, but no one knew what had happened or how to reverse it. For once, Richard was the one who caused a scene, storming into the head technician's office and demanding to know what sick pervert had loaded sexbot software into a police android.

That earned him a meeting with the captain, his very first disciplinary offense. “Do you want to be removed from the pilot program?” Stern asked him. “The DPD's resources are stretched thin at the moment, but if you can't handle an android, we can reassign you to a human partner.”

Richard ran his hands through his hair and looked out through the clear glass wall of Stern's office. Gavin was taking advantage of his absence to sit at Richard's desk and lick all his office supplies.

“I don't want a new partner,” he said, watching as Gavin picked up his page-a-day desk calendar and touched the tip of his tongue to the paper. “I just want this one to work the way he's supposed to.”

He drove home after the meeting. Gavin was silent for the whole ride, uncharacteristically stiff in his seat instead of slouching, like he'd suddenly decided to act like the robot he was. When Richard was pulling into his parking spot, Gavin said, “Would you kiss me if I was human?”

“Yes,” Richard said, because Gavin was handsome even with all the facial damage, and he'd been working so much overtime lately that he hadn't opened a dating app in months.

“Why won't you kiss me now?”

“Because you're _not_ human. You don't have agency, you can't consent. You’re not a real person.” The car was in park, but Richard's hands were still on the steering wheel, gripping it so tight his knuckles were white. “You’re only doing an impression of someone who cares about me.”

And that was where they left it. Richard was still too angry about the disciplinary note in his personnel file to waste any more time arguing with a defective android. He left Gavin and the cat on the couch, closed the door to his bedroom, and spent a fitful night trying not to imagine what he’d do if Gavin was an actual person instead of a machine reading off some script the DPD technicians had loaded into him.

Deviancy was spreading through Detroit by then. Richard was working even more overtime on android cases, chasing down mechanical murderers, living on coffee and cigarettes. He didn't pay much attention to Gavin's continued misbehavior. His android wasn't deviant, just erratic.

When he caught Gavin doodling _rA9_ over and over on a legal pad, Gavin said he was just imitating the suspect in the interrogation room. Richard let himself believe it because the alternative was Gavin getting taken away from him, deactivated, taken apart in a lab at Cyberlife.

Then Connor's perfect HK unit walked out of the station and ended up on the national news. Connor showed up at Richard's apartment, drunk and wild-eyed, and admitted to his brother that he'd helped Hank evade the law. Richard pulled him into a hug and promised not to tell.

The next day, Gavin disappeared. He left Richard's apartment on his own sometimes, but he wasn't at the station, and he didn't return that night. Richard stayed up watching the news, trying to find Gavin's battered face in the crowds of perfect white plastic. The cat kept running to the door every time she heard footsteps in the hallway, but Gavin never showed up. It was too cold to smoke out on the fire escape, so Richard dropped the butts of his cigarettes into his half-empty coffee mug. He wasn't usually so sloppy. Maybe Gavin had accustomed him to a certain level of mess. He left the window cracked when he went to bed, even though it was freezing outside, just in case Gavin came up the fire escape in the middle of the night.

Months passed. Winter faded into a wet, dreary spring. The androids negotiated peacefully for their rights. Connor was back to doing his own paperwork. No one talked about the android pilot program anymore. Richard was pulling ahead of his brother again, racking up arrests, but it didn't make him happy. He watched action movies alone in his apartment. The cat was clingy now, always crying for attention or winding so close around his ankles that he'd trip over her.

And then one day, the HK800 was back in the middle of the bullpen. Captain Stern not only let Connor keep it as a partner, she gave it a salary like it was a real police officer. Richard watched his brother smile for the first time in what felt like ages. He tried to smile too, to be happy on Connor's behalf. He spent his lunch break smoking behind the station and trying not to resent his brother for being so inherently loveable that even the legendary Hank, hero of the android revolution, would choose working with him over making history with the other leaders in DC.

He was relying on caffeine and nicotine to get through the day, then lying awake at night with his heart pounding and his head throbbing. The sleep he did get was shallow. He kept waking up in the middle of the night, convinced he'd heard someone moving in the kitchen or climbing the fire escape outside. Sometimes he even dreamed that Gavin was in the room with him, standing at the foot of his bed, his LED glowing yellow in the darkness.

He was starting to slip at work, missing evidence Gavin would have caught, struggling to remember details. He kept forgetting that he'd already fed the cat, not even remembering he'd done it even when he was staring at a bowl full of kibble in the morning. At least she wasn't so clingy now. She didn't even sleep with him in bed anymore. When he went to bed, she'd sit by the window in the living room, staring out into the night like some bird was going to fly by.

Connor invited him over to his house for dinner. He was living with Hank now, not bothering to hide their relationship from the DPD. Connor spent the whole meal talking about the puppy they were going to get, a certified purebred Saint Bernard. While Hank was doing the dishes, Richard excused himself for a cigarette break. He leaned against the house's siding by the back door and glared at the massive new dog house in the backyard. Connor joined him and passed him a bottle of beer. Richard didn't want to drink. He wanted to go home and watch action movies and maybe, finally, get some sleep.

“I know it's bothering you that he didn't come back,” Connor told him. “You'd never admit it to anyone, but I can tell.”

Richard dropped his cigarette butt and ground it into the wet grass with the toe of his shoe. “I'm glad you're happy,” he said.

“I want you to be happy too.” Connor nudged Richard with his elbow.

Richard blinked, trying to ignore the way his eyes stung. “When did you realize Hank was a real person?” he asked his brother. “Not an android pretending to have emotions, but a genuine sentient being?”

Connor smiled. He’d been even more radiant than usual lately, such a beam of sunshine around the station that Richard knew his sourness was even more obvious in comparison. “I think I always knew. From the very first day, I knew he was special.”

It wasn’t what Richard wanted to hear.

He got home late and collapsed on the couch, bone-tired but jittery at the same time. The cat was sitting by the window as usual. Richard tried to call her over, but she just flicked one ear and ignored him. He put on a movie.

He must have fallen asleep because he woke up to a notification from the streaming service asking if he was still watching. It was cold in the living room. The window was open.

Richard bolted upright, afraid that the cat had gotten out, that some burglar had decided to rob a top floor apartment for no good reason. The only light in the room should have been from the television, but there was a circle of blue above him, a soft glow. When Richard lunged forward it cycled yellow, then red when he grabbed a handful of fabric and pulled.

The intruder was surprisingly light, but strong enough to jerk back out of Richard’s grip. He scrambled for the open window. Richard followed, not fast enough to catch him, but just swift enough to catch a glimpse of pale fabric as the intruder headed not for the ground but the roof.

“Gavin!” he yelled, trying to scramble up after him, but he didn't have the climbing skills of an ultralight android.

There was the soft sound of a light footstep on the roof, but Gavin didn't come down. “I know you’re up there,” said Richard, and that got Gavin to poke his head over the edge of the roof. His LED was an angry red.

“The cat misses you,” Richard told him.

“That’s a lie,” Gavin said. “I visit her all the time.”

“I know you do,” said Richard. He hadn’t realized it until just that moment, but it all made sense: the footsteps in the night, the full bowl of food, the memories he'd assumed were only dreams. He raised his arms, reaching for Gavin, just a few feet short of being able to grab ahold of the rooftop and haul himself up. “I miss you. Please come back.”

Gavin kept staring at him as his LED faded from red to yellow. Richard was beginning to shiver in the night air. Gavin pulled his head back out of sight, and Richard’s heart constricted with the knowledge that Gavin was leaving him again, that the only thing that had been keeping the android in his apartment in the first place was the inability to make any other choice. Then Gavin’s legs were swinging over the edge of the roof, and Gavin was landing lightly on the fire escape in front of Richard. He allowed Richard to fold him into an embrace, to clutch at the grimy grey fabric of what had once been a white hoodie.

Gavin rested his head against Richard’s shoulder, his battered face pressed up against the bare skin of Richard’s neck. He had a new scar on his temple, a gash disappearing up into the hairline. It was bad enough that the chassis had cracked underneath it to reveal the dark blue of old thirium. Richard ran his thumb over it, wondering if the DPD technicians would be able to fix it. He felt a flicker of pressure on his neck, warm and wet. Gavin was taking a sample.

“Why didn't you want me to know you were here?” Richard asked. “Am I really that difficult to deal with?”

Gavin shook his head. His synthetic hair rubbed along Richard's jaw. “You didn't want me around anyway.”

“I never said that.”

“You said I should have been decommissioned.” Gavin was mumbling into his neck, barely audible. Richard struggled to remember when he'd said that. It felt like a different lifetime, when he'd been a different person--but of course, androids never forgot anything.

Gavin was tense in his arms, and Richard was afraid that he was going to make a run for it. If he left now, Richard knew, he wasn't going to come back again. This was his only chance to make things right. “I was wrong. I've never been good with people. I didn't realize--I should have known--”

Words were deserting him when he needed them most. Connor would have known just what to say. Connor would never have messed this up in the first place.

Richard stroked Gavin’s hair, moved his hand down to cup Gavin’s cheek. Gavin leaned into the gesture, rubbing his face against Richard’s palm. His stubble, that cosmetic mod Richard had never figured out how to deactivate, prickled against his skin. He’d seen Gavin behave like that before, leaning into his touch, but he’d assumed it was just his attempt to imitate the cat.

“You were always deviant, weren’t you? For as long as we’ve known each other.” Gavin nodded against his hand. “Why didn’t you leave? You could have walked away at any time.”

“I chose you. I told you that.” Gavin looked up at him. His LED was flickering wildly, flashing from red to blue in a strobing sequence. “Do you believe I’m a real person?”

“Of course I do.”

Gavin’s skin was hotter than a human’s against his, fever-warm in the cold air. “So why don’t you kiss me?”

Richard leaned down. The first kiss was light, tentative, and he forced himself to slacken his grip on the dirty fabric of the hoodie just in case Gavin wanted to pull away. Then Gavin’s tongue was in his mouth and his arms were around Richard’s shoulders, hanging on tight. He hauled himself up to wrap his legs around Richard’s hips, so light it was easy to hold him up.

The cat yowled and swatted at Richard’s legs, tired of waiting at the windowsill. Gavin slid down Richard’s body. His LED was still flickering, but now it was pure blue. Richard grabbed his hand. “Will you stay?”

“Yeah,” said Gavin. He slid through the window. The cat started purring and winding around his legs in a figure eight.

Richard followed him in. “And will you come back to the DPD?”

“Dunno. Haven’t they given you a new partner by now?”

“I’d rather work with you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Oof, I had grand plans for turning this into a series of one-shots, then never finished all the other stories I was going to add. So now this is its own thing. I might add a second chapter.


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